I was trying to encode a plus-minus symbol in python 2.7 between two numbers (e.g. 10 ± 8.9).
From looking at the python documentation I found I needed to encode the plus-minus symbol in UTF-8 rather than the standard ASCII.
Here is a short example highlighting the issue I found, taking the Unicode value for plus-minus from Wikipedia
plusminus = u'\u00b1' print(plusminus) #All seems fine, but this is in ASCII format ± plusminus.encode('utf-8') #Two symbols are outputted. This is strange! '\xc2\xb1' print(a.encode('utf-8')) #Yep. two symbols were encoded from one Unicode ± print(u'\xb1') #Parital solution is to accept latter symbol ± Even though I have solved the issue (sort off) by taking the latter symbol, this seems strange that the encoding would output two symbols. I assume I am doing something wrong here, but I can't find any other examples of this happening.
Here are the questions I have:
1) What am I doing wrong here?
2) Is there a way to encode symbols (e.g. plus-minus) in UTF-8 directly without the additional symobols?
